Joe Sacco, like any veteran foreign correspondent, yearns to be where the action is. A part of him would have liked nothing better than to have been camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last month with the protesters who eventually ended the 30-year reign of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

But Sacco is not like most journalists. His tools might include pen, paper, recording device and camera, but his medium is the long-form comic strip, which doesn’t readily lend itself to a daily deadline.

“The drive is there,” says Sacco. “I have a desire to go there and see things and talk to people. It’s invigorating and exciting. But my work involves a slower process.

“It takes me time to report. I like to sink into the situation. But beyond that, it takes a long time to write and draw my stuff, especially the drawing. You can report that there are 200,000 people in Tahrir Square, but if you want to draw the scene it takes a lot of effort.”

Sacco, paying a rare visit to Toronto this week, will elucidate his working process during a public appearance Thursday at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall. It is a process that has produced three groundbreaking books: Safe Area Gorazde, a 2000 account of the war in the former Yugoslavia; Palestine, a 2001 compilation of earlier reporting that won a U.S. National Book Award; and, most recently, 2009’s Footnotes in Gaza, a historical investigation into two 1956 massacres that resulted in the death of nearly 400 Palestinians.

Born in Malta, raised in Los Angeles and now resident in Portland, Ore., Sacco imagined a more conventional reporting career when he graduated from the University of Oregon in 1981. Newspaper jobs were hard to come by, however, and he ended up working for in-house publications such as the journal for the National Notary Association.

Sacco, who had drawn comics since childhood, eventually started contributing his graphic handiwork to a variety of publications. By the end of the 1980s, he was moving in the direction of combining the two vocations, travelling to the Middle East and producing the serialized strips ultimately compiled in Palestine.

Initially, Sacco’s reputation didn’t extend much beyond the comic -book community, but that changed in 2000 with the publication of Safe AreaGorazde. That book, hailed by the New York Times as one of the year’s best, sold well and in the process created the commercial impetus for compiling the earlier Middle East reporting into a single volume.

The books, also including The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo and other titles, are customarily labelled “graphic novels,” a description Sacco rejects.

“The term ‘graphic novels’ is a way of making adults feel like they’re not buying a comic book,” he says. “I call them comic books. And I call myself a cartoonist, who is working in the field of journalism.”

In a switch from foreign reporting, Sacco is currently contributing to a book about economically declining U.S. communities with author and journalist Chris Hedges, author of last year’s Death of the Liberal Class. Their reporting will focus on Camden, N.J., as well as defunct mining towns in West Virginia. The resulting book, due out next year, will be dominated by text, with accompanying illustrations and comics strips.

“The scenes really lend themselves to illustration,” Sacco says. “There are a lot of abandoned buildings, what they call ghost towns in West Virginia. Also, when we talk to an older miner who has some really rich stories about what mining was like in the ’30s and ’40s, that lends itself to comics. You can take readers down into the mine.”

Sacco credits Maus, Art Spiegelman’s brilliant, two-volume Holocaust memoir, for creating a broader interest in comics. He also sees his drawing style reflected in work of predecessors such as the legendary Robert Crumb and Mad magazine pioneer Will Elder. But Sacco’s most profound influences have come from the print side — from George Orwell’s Depression-era The Road to Wigan Pier to Michael Herr’s Vietnam reportage in Dispatches to Hunter S. Thompson’s political writing.

“With Hunter S. Thompson, it’s not about the crazy stuff. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is probably one of the most intelligent books ever written about American politics. He understands the intricacies of electoral politics, but you can tell he really cares about it passionately. The outcome matters.”

Nothing about Sacco’s approach is slapdash. If you count background reading, on-site reporting and execution, the two Middle East books alone represent more than a decade’s worth of effort.

“I never rush it,” he says. “You can’t have one really good picture and then a bunch that are mediocre.”

Rigorousness aside Sacco, like Orwell and Thompson before him, has no qualms about inserting — or in this case, drawing — himself into the story. His reporting not only seeks the truth, it does so in a way that graphically illustrates for the reader how the reporting was done.

“I am the filter,” he says. “It doesn’t let me off the hook as far as accuracy is concerned, but drawing involves interpretation. There is no way you can get around it.”

JUST THE FACTS

Who: Joe Sacco

Where: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.

When: Thursday at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $10 adults, $5 students and seniors at U of T Tix, 416-978-8849

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